Hood: A Novel

Summary

A tale of grief and lust, frustration and hilarity, death and family

Penelope O’Grady and Cara Wall are risking disaster when, like teenagers in any intolerant time and place—here, a Dublin convent school in the late 1970s—they fall in love. Yet Cara, the free spirit, and Pen, the stoic, craft a bond so strong it seems as though nothing could sever it: not the bickering, not the secrets, not even Cara’s infidelities.

But thirteen years on, a car crash kills Cara and rips the lid off Pen’s world. Pen is still in the closet, teaching at her old school, living under the roof of Cara’s gentle father, who thinks of her as his daughter’s friend. How can she survive widowhood without even daring to claim the word? Over the course of one surreal week of bereavement, she is battered by memories that range from the humiliating, to the exalted, to the erotic, to the funny. It will take Pen all her intelligence and wit to sort through her tumultuous past with Cara, and all the nerve she can muster to start remaking her life.

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Hood - Emma Donoghue

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SUNDAY

Mayday in 1980, heat sealing my fingers together. Why is it the most ordinary images that fall out, when I shuffle the memories? Two girls in a secondhand bookshop, hands sticky with sampled perfumes from an afternoon’s Dublin.

Up these four storeys of shelves, time moves more slowly than outside on the quays of the dirty river. One window cuts a slab of sunlight; dust motes twitch through it. I shut my eyes and breathe in. ‘Which did I put on my thumb, Cara, do you remember?’

No answer. I stretch my hand towards her over the Irish poetry shelf, as if hitching a lift. ‘All I can smell is old books; you have a go. Was it sandalwood?’

Cara emerges from a cartoon, and dips to my hand. She wrinkles her nose, which has always reminded me of an ‘is less than’ sign in algebra.

‘Not nice?’ I ask.

‘Dunno, Pen. Something liquorishy.’ Her eyes drift back to the page.

‘I hate liquorice.’ All I can make out now is vile strawberry on the wrist. I offer my thumb for Cara to smell again, but she has edged down a shelf to Theology. My arm moves in her wake and topples a pyramid of Surprising Summer Salads.

I’m sure to have torn one. I have only ninety-two pence in my drawstring purse, and my belly is cramping. It occurs to me to simply shift my weight on to the ball of my foot and take off like a crazed rhinoceros through the door. Then, being a responsible citizen, even at seventeen, I put my mother’s spare handbag down beside the sprawl of books, and kneel. The princess who sorted seeds from sand at least had eloquent ants to help her. All I get are Cara’s eyes rolling from the safe distance of the Marxism shelf, and a snigger from some art students over by the window. Luckily the black-lipsticked Goth at the till is engrossed in finding a paper bag for an old atlas; in any other bookshop a sales-woman would be pursing her lips and planting her stiletto heel six inches from my fingers. The tomb of Surprising Summer Salads I build is better ventilated than the original, almost Japanese. I have been neat, no one can make me buy a copy. If it were Astonishing Autumn Appetizers, now, I might consider it.

I’m blithering, amn’t I?

Cara is over by Aviation pretending not to know me, so I set off downstairs, trying to soften the slap of my feet on the wood. Ragged posters for gigs and therapies paper the winding stairwell; their sellotape fingers flap in my breeze. Between the third and second floors the blood wells and I think I may be going to topple. Familiar clogs hit the steps behind me.

‘Cup of coffee?’

Cara doesn’t seem to hear, as her shoulders poke past, but when we have come out of the bookshop on to the dazzling quay she says, ‘I’m off caffeine, Pen, I thought I told you.’

‘Since when?’ I shout into a surge of traffic.

‘This morning.’

I let out my sigh as a yawn. ‘A glass of water and a doughnut?’

‘As you wish.’

I pause for a second halfway along the Ha’penny Bridge, to feel it bounce under the weight of feet. I refuse the first and second cafés we pass, as rip-offs. Cara wipes a dark red strand off her eyebrow. ‘Pen, you know I’ve got plenty.’

‘I’d choke on a bun that cost thirty-five pee.’ It sounds like a point of principle, but is based on the ninety-two pence remaining in my purse.

We thread our way through the crowd on College Green in what I hope is a companionable silence. Town is full of twelve-year-olds in limp minis and pedal-pushers; their shoulders are peanut-red, scored with strapmarks. I have often wondered if the Irish consider it ungrateful to use sun block. As we head up Grafton Street the light is like a splash of lemon juice in my face. I turn my stiff neck to find Cara, but she is ahead of me. Five yards ahead, in fact, sprinting. How odd. I scan the mass of shoppers for a familiar face, but then I realize that she is not running up to anyone, just running. Her head is down. Her fringed purse is smacking from rib to rib. I stand still and lose her.

When I catch sight of her narrow body hurtling past the flower barrows, a great weariness comes over me. It occurs to me, by no means for the first time, to let Cara go. But while that thought is worming its way down the nerves, through the labyrinths of flesh, to reach my feet, they are already flailing a path up the street. When I get past the cluster of tourists around the mandolin player, I grip my handbag under my elbow and gather speed. Cara is nowhere in sight, but I trust that even lanky footballers run out of energy when they’ve eaten nothing all day and their clogs are heavy.

Exercise is good for cramps, I tell myself, ho ho. It is not so much the pain that worries me as the possibility that I may take a leap too far and leave my reproductive system, steaming gently, on the pavement outside Bewleys Café. What was the name of that woman in labour, who, forced to race against a horse for the men of Ulster, gave birth at the winning post and cursed them to suffer the same pains every year?

At the top of Grafton Street I begin to doubt my lung capacity. Motivation falters too; Cara could be halfway to Belfast now for all I care. Then I catch sight of a moving dot halfway along Stephen’s Green. I heave a sticky breath and launch myself forward again, swerving round a lamp-post.

My little gold boat is swinging on its chain, its points pricking my throat. Slow down, Cara. ‘Caaaahra! Cha-cha-cha!’ as the girls at school bawl when we play rounders out the back field. You’ve made your point, my beloved. I am following, the puppet is still attached to its string. If you slowed to a walk we could process with more dignity, a hundred yards apart, blinking in the sun. Slow down, damn you.

When Cara reaches the church she pulls up. Touched by one of their pink billboards, perhaps: ‘Repent’ or ‘Come to Me’. She slopes on to a bollard, her hands in her lap. I pound down the last stretch of pavement, feeling like a right eejit. Should I slow to a walk, or fall in a gory heap by her feet, or (this might surprise her) canter right by? I could catch that revving doubledecker before it leaves the bus stop.

Twenty feet before her I come to a halt. I had thought she might be crying, or at least sweating. Instead she is watching the traffic, her gaze neutral. The colour of thin typing paper, as ever. Her ribs are not heaving like a deck in a storm. Only a string of burgundy hair, dangling from her widow’s peak, shows she’s been running.

I don’t expect her to look at me. She doesn’t. ‘You can’t be very comfortable there,’ I wheeze.

Cara gets up from her bollard and falls into line. I loosen the thin gold chain from where it is stuck to my collarbone. We plod along two sides of the Green. It occurs to me to suggest cutting through, but what with sparrows and roses and all, it might seem inappropriately romantic. They are gutting some Georgian tenement; the bulldozers cover our silence. I stare up at the yellow crane, seeing myself fluttering from it like a snagged kite.

‘Mind.’

Her long arm has tugged me out of the way of a truck. ‘Sorry,’ I say, absurdly grateful.

The cramps begin again now, throbbing in my thighs. To distract myself from self-pity, I marshal my pity for Cara. ‘Are you all right, love? Did you suddenly feel sick? Is it the exams? I know you mightn’t feel like talking about it, but I need to know so as I can help.’

Not a word.

I finger my sailboat, my thumb fitting into the slight concavity in its back. ‘Was it something I said?’

Her mouth twists, a smile or disgust, I can’t tell from this angle.

‘Please, pet, tell me.’

In the shop on the corner I buy us choc-ices for something to do with our mouths on the long walk home.

A hint from Mr. Wall’s elbow, and I shut down on the memory of that peculiar afternoon and slipped to my knees. If it wasn’t for him I knew I’d daze right through the consecration, and I couldn’t blame it on the exceptional circumstances because I always daydreamed in mass. There was something so hypnotic about the pattern of antiphons and coughs and acclamations. Six o’clock mass in particular, the day having rubbed out the lines of thought until I could slip into a memory at the drop of a hymn book.

Right up to the responsorial psalm tonight I had focused on the appropriate pieties, especially about the funeral, which was likely, I decided, scanning the vast beige walls, to be grim, as grim as it gets. So I aimed my gaze at the tabernacle and asked to be uplifted. If not all the way up then at least a couple of inches. For the first minutes of mass I had concentrated fairly holily, then, even muttered along with ‘let your face shine on us and we shall be saved’, but of course didn’t that start me off on Cara’s white, unshining face charging through the crowds on Grafton Street. Not a good choice, as memories went, not at all uplifting. Not even educational, since I had never worked out what the hell had got into her that day.

Gotten, Kate would say; Americans said gotten, that much I knew. And sidewalk for footpath, of course, and jello for jelly and jelly for jam. None of which we had in the house since Mr. Wall preferred marmalade, and personally I could kill for chocolate almond spread, right now in fact, on toast. How I wished the Pope would do away with the hour’s fast before communion; not even the saints could have concentrated through fantasies of chocolate almond spread. And there might be a scraping of Cara’s leatherwood honey left but she probably used that up before going on holiday. Find out what Kate eats, I wrote at the top of a mental list, and buy it tomorrow morning after Immac. Also catfood for Grace; he’s resisting those rabbit chunks.

My eyes dawdled across the missalette. I had never noticed before that the official title of the ‘Lord have mercy’ prayer was the gracious phrase ‘Invitation to Sorrow’. Hey there, Sorrow, how’ve you been keeping? Come on in. If your bike doesn’t have lights you can always crash on our sofa tonight. Oh, so you’ll be staying a while, Sorrow? Planning to get to know me better? Grand, so. There’s tea in the pot.

All at once I was very glad, staring at Mr. Wall’s worn corduroys on the kneeler, that he had decided against a traditional funeral with cold ham and aunts trying to make the best of things. ‘No flowers’, I had put in the newspaper notice when I was drafting it at the kitchen table this afternoon – only a matter of hours ago – and ‘donations to Women’s Aid’. I had picked that charity almost at random, but now I seemed to remember Cara saying that everybody should have somewhere to run to. (Or was it just the kind of thing she would say? Was I her ghost writer now, putting words in her mouth?) I had to explain what Women’s Aid was to Mr. Wall, who seemed rather shocked that such things were needed.

‘Take this all of you and drink it’, Canon O’Flaherty was suggesting through the microphone, ‘this is the cup of my blood.’ Kate would be delayed at Logan Airport, I decided, adding it to my list. Winona too, of course, but I couldn’t visualize her. Kate I could see, at least in outline, with her Wall kneecaps set against the back of the seat in front. I could imagine the apologetic drone over the speakers: ladies and gentle captain speaking unfavourable weather traffic controllers considerable period on behalf cabin crew opportunity to complimentary beverage. She’d be sparing a thought for her sleek leather luggage, moving her watch five hours to Irish time (impatient, wasn’t she? wouldn’t she be?), and deciding not to bother with the in-flight film, a heartwarming saga of this that or th’other. Movie, she’d say, not film. I would have to refrain from sniggering when she came out with an Americanism. I couldn’t expect a Dublin grin from someone who went over to the other side the year she turned sixteen.

The Canon was speeding up, probably aiming to be home for the repeat of Glenroe at seven. Or maybe he just knew the words so well that they slid together like raindrops on a window. ‘Welcome into your kingdom our departed brothers and sisters and all who have left this world in your friendship,’ he said conversationally. It had the ring of a holiday brochure: Fly Aer Lingus to Kingdom Come – passengers in Eternal Rest Class get a free pair of travel slippers.

I’m rabbiting, I thought. It’s the shock. Must calm down, wise up, and so forth. Margarine, or some kind of low-fat dairy spread, that would be best; Americans were known to be paranoid about cholesterol.

Was Kate a smoker? Maybe the minute the captain switched off the no-smoking lights she’d be reaching into her holdall for one of those brands that are aimed at executive men and smoked by women who don’t like being patronized. No boiled sweet for the take-off, thank you. She would have accepted a paper and pursued the economic scandals by now; perhaps she would already have launched into the crossword, her carved lips twisting at the worst of the puns. Black rain might roll over the wings, but she wouldn’t be looking out her porthole. What was I talking about, she wouldn’t even be in the plane yet; she’d probably still be packing, back at the smart apartment.

‘Let us offer each other the sign of peace’, and Mr. Wall’s cool hand was taking mine before I woke from my daze. No need to meet his eyes. Receiving my clammy fingers back into my lap, I returned to wondering about his elder daughter. Tense, Kate would undoubtedly be, but which tensions would lie topmost, out of all she had to choose from? If she hadn’t been home in what, ’92 take away ’78, just over fourteen years, then chances were she despised this dog-shaped island and all of us foolish enough to cling to its wet ridges. Perhaps she was one of those people who couldn’t stand the rain, though I never remembered her complaining on drizzly days at Immac. But then there was so much I couldn’t remember, or never knew in the first place; I had only shared a classroom with her for nine months. It was just that I could imagine her as someone whom the rain would irk wildly. She would crack three black umbrellas into it every winter and shove them in bins with the lids blown off.

The good thing about all this frantic thinking was that I would sleep tonight. It might take a hot bath and cocoa and a cry but I would definitely be too tired to stay awake listening out for the phone, rehearsing the words of the call that would tell me it was all some Monty Pythonesque mistake and everything was grand, see you soon pet.

Stop. Stop it this minute, Pen, don’t get sentimental on me now. The ushers will have to carry you out on a pile of collection plates, you great blubbering Cleopatra. Mr. Wall was straightening his blue silk tie as he stood up and bent towards me. Come on now, I barked at myself, get into the queue.

It had all been most businesslike on the phone at lunchtime. I tried Winona in Texas first, but couldn’t bring myself to leave such a message about her daughter on an answer-phone. Whereas Kate picked her phone up on the second ring; her bed had to be right beside it. The line was crackly, with a barely noticeable time lag. I said who I was and why I was ringing – calling, they said, never ringing, remember – and that the funeral would be delayed until Wednesday to give her and her mother time to get here. For a minute I thought we’d been cut off. I was shivering in the hall with my head against the mirror, a draught slipping under the front door. I bellowed ‘Hello? Hello?’

Then Kate’s voice came back, and said she’d be there.

‘Do let us know your flight number and I’ll pick you up from the airport,’ I told her, erring on the formal side rather than the maudlin, because that was Cara’s favourite insult for me any time I showed sentiment she wasn’t in the mood for. When I challenged her on what it meant, all she could come up with was the qualities she associated with the name Maud.

Anyway, the sister said that she’d see about a few days off, and would ring from the airport on arrival in the morning. (Ring, she said, not call, which threw me a little.) ‘Which morning?’ I asked, adding that I could never quite remember which way the hours went.

‘Monday morning,’ Kate told me, and clicked off.

This communion queue wasn’t moving. What were they doing up there, baking the host from scratch? My mind kept lurching between memories. The last time Cara and I had exchanged more than two lines about Kate, that I could remember, was during the big snow. We were in Cara’s bedroom overlooking the back garden; it must have been after I moved into the big house. Schools were shut, Mr. Wall happened to be staying with his aunt in Cork, Cara’s eco-socialist-feminist-whatsit newsletter was skipping an issue, and the buses were off. We made a snowlady down behind the pear tree and reddened her nipples with wine, then went to bed for a three-day breakfast. If I closed my eyes now – only for a moment, as the sluggish queue of communicants came to a halt – there, framed in the small window, was the garden muted with snow, the pear tree dozing under its load, and Cara’s hot flank against mine.

‘I had the weirdest dream last night,’ I tell her, making my voice sleepy. The end of the quilt has a seizure; Grace is worming his way in.

‘Mmm?’

‘I’m out in the Wicklow Hills, right, walking up a steep bit, I think it’s the heathery patch above Lough Dan, and there’s a few stragglers coming down, Germans with rucksacks and such.’

‘Nothing weird about that,’ yawns Cara.

‘Well but, just as I’ve turned sideways against a granite boulder to let the last walker go by, I glance up and it’s your sister.’

‘Kate?’

‘Have you another sister I don’t know about?’

‘Not that I remember.’ Cara reaches down for the cat and lifts his clenched orange limbs on to her knees. ‘Though I suppose they could have smuggled one or two away before I was born.’

I lean up on one elbow and keep my voice airy. ‘In the dream her hair’s blowing across her eyes, and when she pulls it back the face is all dark, like those leathery bodies they found in the bog.’

‘Uuurgh.’ Cara sits up in bed and puts her crumpet down. Grace springs on to my thighs, clawing at the quilt.

‘No, in the dream it isn’t frightening,’ I tell her. ‘Or only a bit. Otherwise she’s normal. She’s got this black leather jacket and a cigarette in her hand.’

‘Kate doesn’t smoke.’

‘She might by now.’ I am concentrating on the cat, scratching the triangle of skull till his eyes narrow with pleasure.

‘Nah, she’s a control freak, she’d hate to need it.’

‘It’s just the dark brown face that’s so strange.’

‘You wouldn’t recognize her if you did meet her, you know.’ Cara tweaks the tip of Grace’s tail. ‘Big sis is probably in a twinset and pearls by now.’

‘I would so. I was in her class.’

‘That was decades ago.’ The crumpet pauses, halfway to her mouth. ‘Listen to me. I used to say that when I just meant a while. But now it’s true. I’ve been on this planet for practically three decades.’

I laugh and take a bite out of her crumpet.

Cara pulls it away, getting butter on my cheek; her face is thoughtful as she bends to lick it off. ‘Honestly, you wouldn’t recognize Kate now, even I mightn’t.’

‘When did you see her last?’

‘Must have been that awful weekend we all spent in the cockroach motel in Cape Cod, in ’84. After that we stopped pretending we were a family.’

‘You must miss her, though,’ I say.

‘Really? Why must I?’ Cara sounds as haughty as her sister used to.

‘Well, you know, blood being thicker than water and all that.’

‘Bullshit’s thicker than either.’

I recoil. ‘I was only saying…’

‘Everybody’s always been only saying,’ she snarls. ‘Pitying me for my broken home, assuming all my problems can be attributed to my being a motherless waif.’ Slowing down, she adds, ‘One guy at college asked could that be why I turned out, ahem, the way I did.’

I groaned. ‘He didn’t! Freud lives.’

Cara rests her nose in the dip of my collar-bone. ‘Didn’t mean to bite your head off, by the way.’

‘Craven apology accepted.’

She puts her buttery tongue in my ear for a moment, as if taking a reading. ‘I do remember missing Kate for a while, actually.’

‘What about your mother?’

‘Missed her a lot more. Kept waiting for her to come back. The visits just upset me. But at that age you change so much in a year. You get used to anything. You forget your life was ever different.’

I nodded, not believing her.

‘In the long run I did fine with Dad. It was him I always used to run to if anything went wrong, anyway. He didn’t think I was feeble the way Mum did.’

‘Surely –’

‘And the year after they left I got you, didn’t I?’ she interrupted, leaning to rub her nose along my wider one. ‘Kate and Mum are more like distant relatives now.’

‘That’s a bit sad,’ I told her.

‘It’s pretty normal. How often do you see your brother, who lives in the same city?’

‘Fair enough.’ I go back to stroking the cat, who is writhing in the valley of duvet between us. ‘Her face would still be the same, you know.’

‘Kate’s?’

‘I bet she still looks just like her photo.’

‘Which?’

‘The one of her on rollerskates, in the dungarees.’

‘I don’t know any photos of her on rollerskates,’ says Cara puzzledly.

‘Don’t you?’

‘You mean those blue dungarees she never let me try on?’

Almost too late, I remember which photo I mean. The one I stole, all those years ago, on my first visit to the big house. I was a sweaty teenager in a red uniform, irked to be stuck watching television with the little sister when what I wanted was a walk in the woods with the big one. ‘Must be confusing it with some other picture,’ I tell Cara, and swipe the end of her crumpet.

My stomach was rumbling as I came back to the present, and to the top of the queue. A gleaming nun deposited the white circle on my tongue. It had taken me years to learn how to dissolve the sweet papery wafer off the ridges of my mouth. Processing down from communion now, head dipped in what my employer Sister Dominic still called the modesty of the eyes, I tried to realize that this was God, sliding down my throat. It was good practice, believing improbable things.

Believing was easier than bowing to his will, anyway. Once I began questioning his motives, I got so angry I wanted to hawk him up again. Why did you do it, you bastard? You couldn’t have needed Cara more than I did. If times are all one in eternity, why couldn’t you have waited a while longer for her?

Like me, Mr. Wall must have dreaded the after-mass jollity of neighbours who hadn’t heard the news yet. Better to have them come across it in tomorrow’s paper. So instead of sitting down for the final prayers we slipped out the heavy door into the dripping twilight. We got to my dark green Mini just as the rain turned heavier. While we fastened our seat-belts in unison it spattered on the windscreen. ‘Kate’s due in tomorrow morning,’ I told him.

‘Who’s that?’

Was he losing his mind on me now? ‘Kate,’ I told him warily. ‘And Mrs Wall.’

‘Oh, forgive me, I still think of her as Cáit, must get out of the habit. Is her mother still calling herself that, Mrs Wall? Sounds a bit old hat.’

‘I believe so. It goes well with Winona.’

‘Yes, Win always had a weakness for alliteration.’ He blew his nose into a large cotton handkerchief.

‘So I’ll pick them up at the airport, will I?’

‘Would you mind, dear, that would be wonderful.’

As I drove through the deserted suburb Mr. Wall looked out the window, head bobbing like a child on a trip. He glanced over once to say, ‘About Wednesday.’

‘I have that all in hand, don’t worry your head. I left the ad on the newspaper’s answerphone, and the Monsignor’s booked.’

‘You’re very good.’

‘And as far as I know all the friends are in the address book so I’ll do some ringing round tomorrow.’

‘Ah, yes. Won’t they see it in the paper?’

‘They’re not all Irish Times readers,’ I explained, sliding the car on to the kerb outside the big house.

‘Of course not,’ said Mr. Wall guiltily.

The honeysuckle hung around the front door, gemmed with rain. I held my breath so as not to smell it. The breeze caught the wind chime made of forks that Cara sent back from her Californian trip a couple of years ago. Such a honeyed tinkle they made; I stilled them with my hand.

We stood in the kitchen with nothing to do. The cat-flap crashed; Grace was off on his evening rambles. I had put my handbag on the sideboard and now my arms hung down, fingers tingling. The kitchen was full of that fuzzy grey light which builds up when a house is left empty round teatime. I was afraid to move and disturb a cloud of it.

‘Have you eaten, Pen?’ asked Mr. Wall. ‘I suppose one ought to.’

I bent to click on the electric fire; its bottom coil bloomed from rust to orange. ‘I had some cheese before mass, but you know me. I could fancy one of your soufflé omelettes.’

‘Yes, you’re partial to them.’ I could hear his face brighten. ‘Very good, give me ten minutes.’ And he set off like a dog loosed from its chain, snapping on the light and rummaging in the larder.

I checked Grace’s water. I heard the sound of an egg smashing on the parquet, but pretended not to notice as Mr. Wall mopped it up. I leaned my bulk against the mahogany sideboard, soothed by the sound of fork whipping egg-white. My eyes began to shut.

‘I wonder, dear, could you do me a favour and run me in later on?’

‘Run you in?’

‘Pay my respects.’

My head was still fogged up. ‘Oh of course. I just, yeah, sure, whenever.’

I cleared my throat in a roar and strode off. Though the living-room was dark, the sky was still blue gauze in the windows. The first thing I did was to draw the velvet curtains and shut it out. Then I snapped on the reading light by the fireplace. There was a torn envelope sticking out of the shelf between Encyclopaedia of World Knowledge and Asterix the Gaul. ‘Cara’, it said in an unfamiliar scrawl. A birthday card from last June? It was empty. I found a dusty biro on the hearth and began to make a list on the back of the envelope.

‘To Do’, it began confidently. ‘Notify Registrar of Births and Deaths’; the nurse on the phone had assured me it was urgent. I wondered had I spelled the word Registrar right; I kept visualizing him as God’s recording angel. ‘Funeral home will arrange chapel of rest and do med. certs’, I scribbled to reassure myself. ‘Ring relatives’, that was unless Mr. Wall showed any signs of initiative. And while I was at the phone, ‘Ring friends’. Cara’s Snoopy address book was down the back of the leather armchair, I remembered spotting it the other day. I walked over now and dug in for it; my back ached. I riffled its three-by-three pages; whose were all these first names, I wondered, all these Sues and Mels and Jays, and how many of them had she slept with? Moving on, moving on, best not to get bogged down in details. ‘Send back ID cards and passport’, I added to my list; I had read in some novel that you had to do that.

It exhausted me even to think of doing all these things. I folded up the envelope and put it in the pocket of my trousers. To kill time, I read the spines of all the books in the fireside case, left to right, top shelf to bottom. Nineteenth-century titles were the most comforting. When I had watched the last five minutes of Biddy and Miley’s thoughts on the weather in Glenroe, Mr. Wall carried in the airy omelette on a tray, and we switched over to a documentary on otters.

I was calm, I was doing fine. He passed me the unopened Bourbon Creams. It was only at the bottom of my second cup of tea that I realized I had eaten halfway down the packet without a pause. I tucked the cellophane over the top and put it back on the tray.

Mr. Wall had left his biscuit on the saucer. ‘Perhaps a quick round?’ At a time like this, the man wanted to play Scrabble.

He cleared his throat. I could see his lips tightening over his teeth.

‘Good idea,’ I told him.

The odd thing was, he played better than ever. He seemed gripped by the need not to think, not to daydream, not to let a word slip by. He put ‘seize’ on a double word square and countered my ‘zebra’ with a nest of the kind of two-letter words that are used only in Scrabble. I watched his face light up with achievement.

At eight exactly Mr. Wall stared at the hands of his watch. ‘Perhaps we should be thinking about making a move.’

‘Yes indeed,’ I said, too hearty.

I stood on the doorstep, waiting for him to get his raincoat. I would drive him there, I decided, but I would not make myself go in. Not that